Labour relief at Hamilton by-election win – but alarm bells over Reform’s rise ...Middle East

Labour’s victory over both the SNP and Reform UK in Hamilton comes as a major boost to Keir Starmer and Scottish party leader Anas Sarwar.

There is a sense of surprise and relief inside Labour at the unexpected by-election result, since the SNP had been strong favourites with bookmakers to hold onto the Holyrood seat.

Some in Scottish Labour had feared that anger at the UK Government could push the party into an embarrassing third place behind Nigel Farage’s party in its traditional, working-class heartlands.

The three-horse race saw Labour candidate Davy Russell take 8,559 votes, ahead of the SNP’s Katy Loudon on 7,957, with Ross Lambie of Reform UK not far behind on 7,088. The Conservatives finished a distant fourth on 1,621 votes.

A win – even if a narrow one – means Labour can enjoy some renewed optimism about its chances of ousting the SNP from power in Edinburgh at the spring 2026 Scottish Parliament election.

It will also calm nerves inside No 10, with Starmer able to tell his own anxious MPs that poor polling and public anger with the winter fuel payment cut and disability benefit reforms can be overcome.

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Questions will now be asked about John Swinney’s future as SNP leader, despite the perception that he has steadied the ship after the messy, tumultuous period after Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation.

Reform UK’s third-place finish – finishing only narrowly behind the two main parties in Scotland – marks their arrival as serious political force north of the border.

Polling guru Prof Sir John Curtice warned Labour that the party’s vote share – 31 per cent – was down on the general election and showed its revival in Scotland had “disappeared”.

Around one in six Labour voters had switched to Reform in Scotland, he said.

Indeed, the one surprise from the Hamilton by-election was how well Reform UK had performed, said Prof Curtice, pointing out that its 26 per cent vote share was even higher than recent Scottish polling suggested.

The Hamilton result also shows that Reform is eating up the Conservatives “for breakfast, lunch and dinner” in all parts of Great Britain, Prof Curtice told the BBC.

The defeat also shows that the SNP’s polling revival since its dire performance at last year’s general election is still fragile.

Swinney – who had claimed the by-election was a straight fight between the SNP and Reform UK – admitted his party had not made “enough progress” since last year’s election.

The First Minister was seen by some as a caretaker leader when he was installed last year – there to steady the ship after the polling decline suffered under his predecessor, Humza Yousaf.

But the Hamilton result will renew speculation that deputy SNP leader Kate Forbes is waiting in the wings to take over if the party does not look on track to win next year’s Holyrood election.

One SNP source told The i Paper it was “absolutely worrying” that Reform UK was now a force in Scotland, describing it as “a problem for everyone”.

The rise of Farage’s party north of the border threatens to cause chaos with Holyrood’s traditional arithmetic.

Reform UK was second behind the SNP, ahead of Labour, in Survation’s most recent Scottish survey, polling which put the right-wing insurgents on course for 21 seats in the Scottish Parliament next year.

This kind of result may make it hard for either the pro-independence parties (SNP and the Greens) or the established pro-union parties (Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems) to form a working majority.

If no one finds it palatable to work with Reform, Labour, and the SNP may even have to consider an unprecedented coalition in Scotland.

A jubilant Sarwar was in no mood for such scenarios this morning, saying the Hamilton result was “first path in the road to a Scottish Labour Government”.

He added: “I’m not going to say we definitely knew we were going to win – but we always believed we could win. We’ve proven the pollsters wrong, the commentators wrong, and the bookies wrong.”

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